The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In commercial aircraft applications, it is often necessary to collect, reconcile and update a wide variety of information, such as airworthiness data, weather data, fuel, flight plans, etc., stored in a plurality of peer-to-peer databases. This operation is known in the information technology industry as “synchronizing” the databases. When using mobile platforms, the synchronization operation often needs to be carried out in network environments that may have limited bandwidth and availability. Specifically, the on-board databases of an aircraft and the off-board databases are often required to retain common data for use by applications running on-board the aircraft and off-board at a remote location.
When synchronizing the various, and often numerous, databases, it has traditionally been necessary to compare the entire list of records in one database with an entire list of records in another database to determine which records are missing between the databases. This design configuration thus requires that each system compare records of its databases against the databases of every other system in the peer network in order to synchronize. This can be quite time consuming, data intensive (requiring movement of large amounts of data) and involve significant bandwidth on the network being utilized for this purpose. Typically for mobile platforms to stay synchronized with non mobile platforms, the mobile platform requires a constant and synchronous connection to the network that all systems are connected to.